Thursday, July 1, 2010

Guess who I like better

The first thing to say, then, is this is how Orientalism works: we know what pictures of the Orient we want, and so we go out and get them. ...

It tells us a great deal about her and what she went to Saudi Arabia to find (and did find), in other words: confirmation. After all, look back at that quote: the fact that they’re selling her exactly the image she wants to buy — a slowly modernizing puritanical society — passes completely under her radar; she wants images of burkas next to swimming pools and they’re happy to give them to her, happy to cater to her belief that social justice is a sort of natural outgrowth of luxury. But this business of “wary Saudis” is preposterous; it would be hard for a trip to be more fundamentally state sponsored trip than hers was, and the image of “wary Saudis” was just one of the images they provided her to pose next to.

Ethan's working through his music collection in alphabetical order

(Project began May 29, 2010. Finished through the letter B on April 1, 2011 with 460 items catalogued on Rate Your Music.)

Ethan's reading

Samuel R. DelanyTritonaka Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

Thoughts that aren't getting whole posts

- I just caught my cat licking one of my dirty shirts. When he saw I was watching, he pretended he'd been cleaning himself all along. -ethan 9/23/11

- I didn't know The Pixies covered "I've Been Waiting for You"! So on Heathen, David Bowie covered The Pixies AND a song they covered? Weird. -ethan 9/21/11

- Dangerous Visions is so goddamn macho. And like half the writers are military or "intelligence" or government or advertising dudes. It largely bites. -ethan 9/10/11

- I wish people would figure out that "HD" is not even close to "like you're actually there"--it's completely different from how we really see things. If they figured that out, maybe it would occasionally be used interestingly. -ethan 9/9/11

- Robinson Crusoe on Mars has its major problems, but it looks like a series of living Nicholas Roerich paintings. -ethan 9/3/11

- I just plain don't like Brian Aldiss. -ethan 8/31/11

- Here, at least, it was a good hurricane. I'm embarrassed by how happy I was when the electricity came back on. -ethan 8/28/11

- Is it my imagination or is IOZ way more open about genuinely caring about things since his return? -ethan 8/26/11

- Does Firefox constantly tell British people that they're spelling labour and programme and theatre wrong? -ethan 8/25/11

- There is a huge (and hugely important) difference between knowing that events a, b, and c happened between years x and y, and understanding that they were happening at the same time. -ethan 8/24/11

- Among the many things bugging me about the crappy novel I'm reading is that it keeps referring to a woman whose "late teens" were "forty years ago" as a "little old lady." Come on now, she's 59 at the oldest. -ethan 8/22/11

- Spending a day in the woods is the best thing in the world. -ethan 8/21/11

- Maria Mies: "Powerless groups, particularly if they are totally integrated within a system of power and exploitation, find it difficult to define reality differently from the powerful." -ethan 8/20/11

- The funniest sentence in Frankenstein: "I found that I could not compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition." -ethan 8/18/11